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For anything and everything. ARKs are mostly used to identify Uses of ARKs include
- digital content, such as genealogical records (FamilySearch)
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- publisher content (Portico)
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- digitized manuscripts (Gallica)
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- texts (Internet Archive)
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- museum holdings (Smithsonian)
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- historical figures (
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- snaccooperative.org)
- datasets,
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- journals, living beings, and more.
Why would I use ARKs?
- To keep costs down.
- To work with exactly the metadata I want.
- To be able to create identifiers without metadata.
- To use open infrastructure consistent with my organization's valuescreate an identifier as soon as I create the first draft of my data.
- To work with identifiers that evolve, deciding later (perhaps years later) which to publish and which to discard.keep that identifier private while the data evolves, and decide (maybe years) later, to publish or discard it.
- To keep that identifier upon publication, and to assign an additional identifier, such as a DOITo create one identifier that enables thousands of identifiers to be resolved (N2T's suffix passthrough).
- To integrate with the Data Citation Index ℠ and ORCID.org researcher profiles.
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- To link identifiers to different kinds of nuanced persistence commitments.
- To use open infrastructure consistent with my organization's values.
- To create one identifier that enables millions (suffix passthrough).
What does ARK have in common with DOI, Handle, PURL, and URN?
These are all major so-called persistent identifier schemes (or identifier types). They have They have much in common, starting with structure:.
https://n2t.net/ark:/99999/12345
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As seen in these examples, they all begin with they all have three parts:
- the protocol (
https://) plus a hostname, - followed by the Name Assigning Authority (
99999,10.99999, orpurl.org), which is the organization that created a particular identifier
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- ,
- and finally there's the name, or local identifier, that it assigned (
12345).
And they all have very little effect on persistence.
Do you mean that ARK, DOI, Handle, PURL, and URN are useless?
No, but it's good to keep these identifier schemes (types) in perspective. Some more things these schemes have in common:
- They all fail to stop the major causes of broken links: loss of funding, natural disaster, war, deliberate removal, human error, and provider neglect.
- They all burden the end provider with the responsibility to update forwarding tables as URLs change.
- They all give access to any kind of thing, whether digital, physical, abstract, person, group, etc.
- They all identify content that is subject to change on future visits.
- They all break regularly and in large numbers (thousands and more).
- A non-trivial fraction of each scheme's identifiers will fail permanently, requiring forwarding to "tombstone" pages.
- They all use ordinary redirection built in to web servers since 1994 and provided for free by hundreds of URL shortening services.
- A non-trivial fraction of each scheme's identifiers will fail permanently, requiring forwarding to "tombstone" pages.
Given how little each scheme type gives you, it is wise to consider factors such as cost, risk, and your values openness when choosing one.
How do ARKs differ from identifiers like DOIs, Handles, PURLs, and URNs?
The short answer is that ARKs are the only mainstream, non-siloed, non-paywalled identifiers that you can register to use in about 24 hours. DOIs, Handles, and PURLs require resolution and other services to come from their respective centralized systems (silos). ARKs are very unusual in being decentralized. While one can get resolution services from a global ARK resolver called n2t.net, over 90% of the ARKs in the world do not use it.
More than 500 registered organizations across the world have created an estimated 3.2 billion ARKs, and no one has ever paid for the right to create them.
That's not to say that persistence is free. Making any identifier persistent burdens you, the provider, with the costs of content management, hosting, monitoring, and forwarding. You can do those things yourself or with help from a vendor. But with ARKs, just as with URLs, you will not be charged separately for your identifiers and you will not be locked in to a special-purpose resolution silo that also locks out other identifiers.
ARKs are very unusual in being decentralized. While one can get resolution services from a global ARK resolver called n2t.net, over 90% of the ARKs in the world do not use it.
More than 500 registered organizations across the world have created an estimated 3.2 billion ARKs, and, as with URLs, no one has ever paid for the right to create them.
How else do
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the identifier types differ?
Here are some more differences between DOIs, Handles, PURLs, and URNs.
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